


chasing shadows

by satellites (brella)



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-10
Updated: 2013-09-10
Packaged: 2017-12-26 06:04:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/962486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brella/pseuds/satellites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You know because you’re certain that he is far too smart to go anywhere that he can’t come back from, and far too good-hearted to ever do this to you. He’s working on coming home. All you really have to do is wait, and you’re fine with that.</p>
            </blockquote>





	chasing shadows

**Author's Note:**

> prompt: "artemis crock, blue lantern corps"

"Just go!" he shouts to you. His stealth suit blends him in with the dark walls of the Brain’s research compound. He shoves you down, his palm on your back, to avoid a fan of bullets from Mallah’s gun. You both hit the ground and your teeth cut into your tongue and his voice is in your ear: "Nightwing needs backup. Don’t worry. I’ll find you."  
  
It’s not the right time to do it – you’re supposed to be on a break, and you’re both staring down a psychotic genetically enhanced gorilla mutant with an assault rifle. But you turn your head to the right and smash a messy (bloody) kiss onto him and he seems surprised, his hand hovering at your neck, as Mallah reloads.   
  
You pull away the second he eases into it and tangles his fingers in your hair. Your mouth is lined with his taste and with your own blood. You grin.   
  
"Not if I find you first," you whisper to him, and then you roll away and run to the sound of him laughing behind you.   
  


* * *

You think of that sound at the memorial service.   
  
"If brief is the opposite of debrief," Dick keeps whispering next to you, and it gets faster and more desperate when Batman activates the hologram, "then ceased is the opposite of deceased."   
  
The mantra works its way into your head, too, after a while. You keep trying to will yourself not to hope, because hope hurts, and hope destroys – but you’d be doing him a gross disservice by writing it off completely. So some nights, after the missions are over and your joints are shaded in bruises, you look out over the boundless stars from the Watchtower and try to find his hands in them, and every time a ball of burning white tumbles from the canopy, you wonder if it’s going to land in Palo Alto and grow red hair and step out of the smoking crater and ask where you are.   
  
It makes sense, though, doesn’t it? “Cease” could mean anything. The Scarab hadn’t said he would  _die_  or  _disintegrate_  or  _perish_  or anything like that. It had said he would  _cease_. Maybe it hadn’t had a word in its vast vocabulary for what had happened to him; maybe it hadn’t known exactly where he’d gone. You know, though. You know every time a blast of wind hits you in the street, and you know every time the barbecue smoke from the house next door drifts over into your backyard. You know because you don’t move out of the fourplex. You know because you still take Brucely for walks along the same route. You know because sometimes you still make enough food for yourself and a bottomless speedster. You know because you refuse to sleep anywhere but on the left side of the bed, with your ankle just slightly dangling off the edge.   
  
You know. You know because you’re certain that he is far too smart to go anywhere that he can’t come back from, and far too good-hearted to ever do this to you. He’s working on coming home. All you really have to do is wait, and you’re fine with that. You’re fine with tracing his shape in the stars and waiting.

* * *

You watch with hard eyes as the world around you moves on, and waiting starts to feel like a coward’s game. You punch harder, shoot straighter, run faster. You start to wonder if you’re growing out of Wally West like he’s a favorite shirt. 

  
The ring comes out of nowhere, all things considered. It hits you dead in the eye and you have to double over and clutch your face and curse loudly at the patch of grass on which you’re standing. The whole ordeal makes you trip and thus tip over the garbage can you’re rolling out onto the sidewalk, and the trash spills out onto the street: take-out and gum wrappers and not a single picture frame or pair of track shoes.   
  
Once you recover, you glare up with narrowed eyes to find a glistening blue ring hovering in front of your face. Captain Atom’s made you read enough intergalactic relations history textbooks for you to recognize that it looks just like Guy Gardner’s (he’d always been your favorite): the Lantern logo shimmers in the light from the crescent moon, and the ring bobs indolently in midair.   
  
” _Artemis Crock of Earth,_ " a quiet voice whispers, somewhere between your heart and your spine, " _Hope fills your broken heart. You have been chosen._ "   
  
It fits on your finger far too nicely, right in the spot where Wally had once slipped a plastic ring from a Crackerjack Box and declared, on one knee, “Artemis Crock, will you be my mission partner?”   
  


* * *

  
"Whoa, blue, huh?" Bart asks many days later, expertly interrupting your debrief with all three of Earth’s Green Lanterns. "Looks good, looks good! Now both of my favorite people are rockin’ it! Don’t make my hermano jealous now! Ha,  _ha_!”   
  
There isn’t an ending to this. The blue costume fits every contour of your frame the way Wally’s hands would: certain and whole. Another world is opened up before you, intergalactic wars and voyages through the stars, but you always make sure to drop your feet onto Earth again and smell the summer wind barreling toward you and remind yourself that yes: you will always find him first.

 


End file.
